This Day in 1913 in The Record: Feb. 18, 1913

Tuesday, Feb. 18, 1913. The Rensselaer County Bar Association honors Justice Wesley O. Howard for his appointment to the Appellate branch with a banquet and fulsome speeches of praise at the Hotel Rensselaer tonight, The Record reports.

"Wherever on earth there are real men they give honor to a man who has done something, who has achieved results," says Bar Association president Calvin S. McChesney in his introductory remarks. Howard "has made good as lawyer, politician, district attorney, justice and, may I add, farmer, is our guest and one of us."

Howard himself turns this tribute from lawyers to a judge into a tribute to harmony between bench and bar in Rensselaer County. Elsewhere "he had observed a strangeness and hostility between the bar and bench, but never in the Third Judicial district during his ten years as a jurist, for the relations had always been friendly, cordial and agreeable."

County Judge Michael A. Tierney praises Howard as a man "who may well be considered a typical American. Of Anglo-Saxon stock, his ancestors had for generations been indigenous to the country, and his fondness for the country and agricultural pursuits may be said to be an inherent trait. His ancestors came here when material, and in a measure, intellectual forces had been at a standstill for nearly two thousand years. It was a new era and his progenitors here have been the eyewitnesses of greater material and intellectual development than had taken place in the twenty centuries before their coming to America.

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"It was among these hills that the active imaginative mind of the ambitious youth planned his future, conscious of the wonderful development and progress of the times, he sought to be part of it. His aim was high, his ambition untiring, his energy restless and well directed to reach the goal he sought. His courage, his earnestness, his labor, have brought him success and honors, and who will doubt that the inspiration which prompted his ambition, buoyed his courage and sustained his efforts were gathered among the rugged hills where his boyhood days were spent?"

Attorney John T. Norton makes Howard's promotion an occasion to defend the beleaguered American judicial system. Progressives and socialists have attacked the courts for appearing to favor wealth over people in their decisions.

"In these days of unrest and criticism of the administration of justice we ought to stand up and be counted for what we are," Norton says.

"He ridiculed the [proposed] recall of judges and judicial decisions," our reporter notes, "and said it was simply the old story of trying to supplant representative democracy with despotism."